My so-called week

Naming and shaming

We were driving to the outskirts of London for the first barbecue of summer and I was selecting humorous and quirky items from the Sunday newspapers to read out to the man behind the wheel. It's the kind of thoughtful in-car entertainment that I like to think makes me a cut above, companion-wise, besides which it was no mean feat, given that I was balancing an unstable pavlova on my knees at the time. In this kind of delicate situation, tabloid is good and so it was that I fell on The Observer's guide to the top 500 British surnames.

I mean no disrespect when I say that I wish I hadn't for, in the time it took to get from Gants Hill to Romford, decades of hard slog up the inhospitable rockface of the class system had suffered a possibly irreversible setback. And all for the want of an E.

'Do you want to know what yours means?' I asked the so-called boyfriend, who shot me a sideways glance generally reserved for the moments I try to read him his horoscope, probably because he's on to the fact that I make it up as I go along, as in 'this is a week to seize the day; impromptu foreign travel is indicated, preferably with a loved one'. But why might he mind discovering the origins of his irrefutably Irish surname, I wondered? 'It's my slave name,' he retorted. 'You gave it to me when you stormed into my country without asking. My real name is -' and then he said something that began with a C, ended with a G and possibly an H, and had a whole load of vowels poured into the middle in no vaguely discernible order. We moved swiftly on before he could get on to the famine.

Now. I knew, I suppose, that the name Clark probably suggested someone who'd had to write stuff down, as in clerk, and I was delighted to find that my forebears were, of course, scribes. I was even more delighted when I read that the group that people with my name are most likely to belong to is nicknamed Urban Intelligence. 'Liberal, young and educated,' went the description. 'Concentrated in large cities.' Bingo! There we are, the Clarks, all hanging out in juice bars in Notting Hill, talking about Heidegger and human-rights abuses. Just what I've spent my whole life aiming for!

Except. It's not me, or the Clarks, who do that. It's the Clarkes. The Clarks, it transpires, have a rather rougher deal, being but poor relations to their aural namesakes. The Clarks are not urban intelligent, it said. Nothing like it. They are Welfare Borderline. They are often in minimum-wage jobs, it went on. They live in council accommodation. And they have transient family formations. And no amount of sitting in a car with a pavlova reading titbits out from the quality press can get around that.

I rang my dad to tell him. 'What we've had out of the welfare state wouldn't buy a bag of chips,' he said crossly, 'and we're not transient. I never go anywhere.' Good point, though actually he is a great walker. And often his ambles take him to a tiny place called Holywell, which nestles just below Beachy Head and where, in the last century but one, they made great fortunes quarrying chalk and burning lime. And there it was that a shameful episode took place, when a group of women, who suddenly found themselves confronted with the bailiffs when their husbands were away, put their crosses on a piece of paper and unwittingly signed away the rights to the land and their cottages.

The terrible Holywell landgrab has long been part of local folklore, and particularly in my own family. The people thus defrauded were called Boniface, which was my mother's maiden name. It is a name unlikely to appear in many lists, though there are, apparently, many in East Sussex, the most famous of whom was a man who fought fiercely on the side of the Salvation Army in the celebrated Eastbourne riots. Anyway, should I free myself from the patriarchal jackboot that prevents names from being inherited via the distaff side, I would leave behind Welfare Borderlines and all that they connote, and recast myself as what I surely really am: the heiress to a great chalk fortune, cruelly cheated of her birthright. Now there's posh.

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.